Fashion Now // Lagerfeld, Love and Cobain on Kim Kardashian

If someone gifted with the self-marketing talents that Kim Kardashian West frequently displays whenever a public or private camera lense snaps, their future journeys to Paris will imply a larger amount of safety measures now as well as the avoidance of Paris’ now-infamous Hotel de Pourtalès, located on Rue Tronchet in the 8th Arrondissement. Even if you cannot afford jewelry worth 10 million euros, belongings of less value may be safer in an apartment booked online via airbnb or Paris Apartments. At least you can make sure that your temporary accomodation has a front door secured by an electronic code.

This was truly not the case when Mrs Kim Kardashian West got a late-night visit by five assailants dressed as cops in her luxury apartment at Hotel de Pourtalès last night. The robbers pinched a ring worth 5 million dollars alone and other contents from her private jewelry box, in addition to jewelry especially borrowed for Paris Fashion Week and two iPhones. The well-considered and quite intricate, celebrity-prized commodity of privacy neither had an electronically coded front door or cameras inside or out nor any decent items of safety measures available. That noted, it took the disguised villains only minutes from handcuffing and gagging a male concierge to the point that the victim had to be taken by surprise, tied up and locked in her bathroom with her mouth taped shut in order to level off her screams as the thieves plundered the suite.

Call it stupidity, ignorance or arrogance: What makes you check into an auberge with no real security procedure inside, having bling worth 10 million euros carelessly stuffed in your Hermès and Louis Vuitton luggage? After many celebrities have been offering support and sympathy for poor Kim after the robbery, Chanel’s chief creative director Karl Lagerfeld had opposing views: “I don’t understand why she was in a hotel with no security. If you are that famous and you put all your jewelry on [social media], you go to hotels where nobody can come near to the room.” he told Associated Press. Presumably, as the robbers planned the heist, they may have tracked Kardashian’s endless bling-draped self-promotion on Instagram beforehand. That can, as many law-enforcement experts have pondered, have been the initial trigger for the operation. “You cannot display your wealth, then be surprised that some people want to share it,” Lagerfeld said. The whole Kardashion affair may eben have some adverse effects on the image of Paris, which is “a very bad thing” in the words of Lagerfeld.

If there’s some positive prospect here, it’s that the West family has immediately planned to undergo some sort of a personal-security review, hopefully including Kim’s Instagram image posting strategies and future trips to any fashion capital. The Hotel de Pourtalès owners, on the other hand, will be putting their establishment through a security review of an equal if not greater degree than that of the West family, if they hope to keep even just two or three of their former celebrity clientele. In fact, the Hotel de Pourtalès now faces a marketing disaster of terrific proportions: No more Leo, no more Madonna – nobody wants to be dragged out of bed by a gang of armed assailants. At 16,000 euros per night, as the de Pourtalès costs, or, really, at any price.

Catherine on Rue de l’École de Médecine // Jungle Fever

Catherine on Avenue du Général Eisenhower // On her Way

Hype Song of the Month // Guy Gerber Secret Encounters

DJ, Producer, Ibiza clubbing celebrity Guy Gerber returns to his own RUMORS label with his first release since the success of last summer’s Rumors On The Dancefloor EP. Secret Encounters is Guy’s first solo EP on RUMORS, and more than lives up to the high standard he’s set for the label. The title track strongly channels the uplifting atmosphere that Guy regularly creates at his RUMORS event series and Ibiza residency at Destino Pacha Resort.

Secret Encounters proves Guy’s love for high quality studio productions is as strong as ever. Gerber’s attention to haunting grooves, poignant sequencing and witty sampling shines through across the ten-minute track, fitting in perfectly with the kind of enigmatic deep and tech house that has become the hallmark of his RUMORS brand. Definitely being one of this summer’s great house tunes, Secret Encounters surprises with some weird vocal samples from US series Fargo on top. Remember Peggy (Kirsten Dunst) and Constance (Elizabeth Marvel) arguing about stolen TP and broken cars?

Snapped on Via Monte Napoleone // Guess Who

Nicole on Via Clerici // Vintage Breakfast at Tiffany’s Tote Bag

Nicole’s retro Breakfast at Tiffany’s tote bag brings back memory to the unforgettable Audrey Hepburn. The iconic actress starred in 28 films over the course of her career, but none of her roles was more famous than Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The 1961 Truman Capote adaptation turned eating a pastry while window-shopping into a whimsical rite of passage and is forever synonymous with the generously browed Hepburn.

Today it is hard to imagine anyone else than Audrey Hepburn as troubled call girl Holly Golightly, but Truman Capote, on whose novel Blake Edwar’s movie was based, was totally disappointed when Audrey Hepburn was cast in the role. When Capote sold the rights to Paramount, he originally had envisioned Marilyn Monroe as Holly and believed that Audrey was completely wrong for the part. Today we also know that the guy was utterly wrong.

Olivero on Corso Venezia // Sitting Pretty

Mario on Via Luca Beltrami // Hat for the Cool

Fashion blogger Mario Porrovecchio must have rent at least three storehouses to stack a myriad of outfits, which he busily presents through his website corvus88 accompanied by some obligatory Instagram and facebook accounts. Mario displays a white fedora with an orange coloured hat band. Fedoras were commonly associated with gangsters and Prohibition, which coincided with the height of the hat’s popularity in the 1920s to early 1950s. They were a daily accessory for many American men until J.F. Kennedy, a style icon in his own right, making public appearances without hat and started a long trend toward general hatlessness. In popular culture, style icons like David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna gave this classic hat a new look, often choosing brighter colours and pushing its comeback as indispensable item of the cool.

Another great personality has left us: French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel has died at the age of 86, after suffering from Parkinson’s disease for nearly two decades.

Today, The house of Sonia Rykiel issued the following statement commemorating the life of the company’s founder: “It is with deep emotion that the house of Sonia Rykiel announces the death of its founder, Mrs Sonia Rykiel. With her passing away, the fashion world has lost an icon, a pioneer and a huge chocolate lover. More than a designer, she was an extraordinary woman and an artist who devoted her life to woman and their freedom.”

Rykiel resigned from her role as CEO and artistic director of her eponymous brand in 1995 but remained close to the label, serving as honorary president until 2009 when she eventually retired. She is survived by her two children, Jean-Philippe and Nathalie.

The designer made a name for herself in 1970 as the Queen of Knitwear, after she opened her first store in Paris two years earlier, attracting clients like Catherine Deneuve and Audrey Hepburn. Her trademark knitwear pieces include deconstructed, rough-hemmed jumpers, which are a key category in the company’s main line collections and its more accessible contemporary line, Sonia by Sonia Rykiel.

French President Francois Hollande praised Rykiel as “a free woman and a pioneer” in a statement announcing her death today. “She invented not only a style, but also an attitude, a way of living and of being, and gave women a freedom of movement,” he said. “Passionate about culture, she did not conceive of fashion without the arts, which were always present in her creations. Her style is known across the world. It will remain a symbol of the remarkable alliance of colour and the natural, of fluidity and light.”

Sonia Rykiel’s unintentional rise to fashion stardom began in the early 60s, when she decided to make those famous little customised jumpers that would make her stand out from the average crowd. Between 1962 and 1968, Rykiel designed all kinds of knitwear. Not content with altering the shapes and producing them in every possible colour, she also introduced stripes, which soon became one of her signatures. “I was fascinated by stripes from the start. On clothing they follow a woman’s movements,” she once said. Over the time, Sonia Rykiel reinvented knitwear and made it into something feminine that clung like a second skin.

How did Sonia Rykiel become so well-known so quickly? “Remember this was the ‘Swinging London’ era, and a new wind of freedom was blowing through people’s mores, especially young people, transported by pop music and pop art,” author Régine Deforges said. “On the Kings Road, Mary Quant had launched the first miniskirts, followed by Courrèges in 1964, and Saint Laurent in 1966. They caused an outrage, like the short tunics and bra-less women of the 1967 California ‘Summer of Love’. Sonia Rykiel was part of that movement to free women’s bodies and emancipate them from the codes of what was overall a very bourgeois fashion.”

Zhanna Romashka on Place Vendôme // In strong Colours she trusts

Fashion Now // The World of cosmopolitan Style

If it’s good enough for Paris Hilton, who is rumored to shop here every now and then, it’s good enough for us. One of the 1000 and one things to do while in Paris is a trip over the city’s Triangle d’Or, i.e. the Golden Triangle between the Champs Elysées, Avenue Montaigne and Avenue George V – at least window shopping wise. Luxury fashion labels congregate behind grandiose entrances, leaving you dragging your jaw past fabulous yet unaffordable window displays. French people even have an expression for that: lêche-vitrine, translating window licking in English. It’s that what you’ll be doing in Triangle d’Or a lot. If it’s not only for window licking, then it’s an eldorado for fashionistas and victims of conspicious consumption. Paris’ first multi-brand designer boutique is Montaigne Market with over sixty international designers, offering seductive prêt-à-porter. You can meet the beautiful ones at the Market during Paris Fashion Weeks even at night, sipping champagne and having witty small talks over the most exclusive pieces of the next season. But even if you can’t afford that Christopher Kane leather dress at 2000 Euros, you can still evaluate who’s hot in the world capital of cosmopolitan style, even if it’s through a peephole or a shop window, respectively.